Meaningful Use and certification standards will be expanded to cover more patient safety-related objectives.

ONC will create tools that will allow provider EHR users to assess patient safety in their organizations.

ONC awards the Joint Commission a sole source contract to assist the ONC in detecting and proactively addressing health IT-related safety issues across a variety of care settings. The Joint Commission will develop an IT incident classification system, provide de-identified reports on related sentinel events, conduct at least five event investigations each in hospitals and practices, develop provider tools to help providers understand IT-related sentinel events, and publish a research paper that analyzes IT-related sentinel events.

Reader Comments

From Evangelist: “Re: Epic. Killing it in large practices.”More than half of all EMR-using practices that have 40 or more doctors use Epic, according to SK&A. Allscripts and eClinicalWorks each serve a substantial percentage of the smaller offices and the top 20 vendors support almost three-quarters of all practices using an EMR. Where people get in trouble is trying to infer from this limited information who’s buying what, which is more a question of practice ownership rather than practice size as hospitals keep buying out doctors and sticking Epic and Cerner in there.From Pointy Head: “Re: McKesson. Killing the MED3OOO Unity project and sunsetting InteGreat in favor of Practice Partner. There have been layoffs.” Unverified. McKesson acquired MED3OOO in October 2012 and claimed major go-forward love for InteGreat, so that’s quite a change in stated direction if so.

From Iknowa: “Re: Inova. Will collaborate with ValleyHealth, which has hospitals in Virginia and West Virginia, in several strategic areas, including IT. Inova brought its final two hospitals live on Epic over this past weekend, with all five now live on both financials and clinicals.”

From Patient Portal Believer: “Re: portals. Mr. H, you are spot on about the need for a strong patient portal strategy. EMR vendors that don’t currently have a tested and feature-rich patient portal should go out and acquire a portal vendor while there are still a few companies available. The portal is too important to MU2 and beyond to ‘partner’ with a portal vendor and it’s too late in the game to still be developing your homegrown solution. Yet, there’s still a handful of sophisticated inpatient EMR vendors without a portal answer. Hard to believe.“

From HITEsq: “Re: IRS conservative targeting scandal. RHIOs seeking non-profit tax exemptions were sent to the IRS group that reviewed Tea Party applications.” A New York Times article from last week says the IRS targeted not only conservative groups, but any groups whose use of non-profit application keywords suggested political activities. Among the keywords the IRS used to trigger further scrutiny was “regional health information organizations.”

From West Coast Angel: “Re: RECs. Over half of the 63 ONC grant-funded Regional Extension Centers are developing new service lines in privacy and security, patient engagement, practice optimization, and new service delivery models like ACOs. First round will go live in September.”

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

EyeNetra, which offers inexpensive eye-testing technology using smartphones, raises$2 million in equity funding.Allscripts closes $650 million in new financing, which with previously announced credit lines gives it a net of $400 million in liquidity.

As reported here this past weekend on HIStalk from an Indoor Privy rumor, Intuit announces plans to divest its health group, including the patient portal business it acquired from Medfusion in 2010 for $91 million. Intuit says it thought the health group could make money, but it needs to be owned by someone who understands healthcare better. It would not be surprising to see one of Intuit’s resellers — such as Allscripts, GE, or Greenway — make a play for the business.A union investment group urges McKesson’s shareholders to vote out Chairman and CEO John Hammergren and two other directors because of Hammergren’s compensation, also demanding that the company split the chairman and CEO roles he holds.

The Boston newspaper says a real estate deal involving athenahealth as a corporation and Jonathan Bush as a personal investor, along with a developer, will turn several real estate parcels in the Arsenal on the Charles area near athenahealth’s headquarters into apartments, restaurants, and boutiques that will cater to young technology professionals. According to Bush, “We have work but we couldn’t get live and play into the Arsenal on the Charles. Nobody in this generation wants to schlep for an hour and a half on the Mass. Pike to a little patch of land. This is a generation of people who are just coming out of their dorm rooms. That’s who we’re hiring. These are people who want to work and live near a restaurant that grows its own food, a bar that makes its own beer.”

Kathleen A. Frawley, AHIMA board chair and president, died last week at the age of 63, according to an AHIMA notice. She was also a professor and chair of the HIT program at DeVry University’s North Brunswick, NJ campus. Angela Kennedy will take over as AHIMA board president/chair.

Flagler Hospital (FL) went live this past weekend on Allscripts SCM, ED, lab, radiology, HIM, registration, scheduling, billing, pharmacy, medication administration, and CPOE. According to HIStalk friend CIO Bill Rieger, “So far so good. Mandatory compliance for physician training has led to some great conversations. The Breakaway Group training simulator program has worked and benefited us Day 1 more than we thought it would. MAKE Solutions workflow testing team work really saved us a lot of Day 1 pain as well. Kudos to the Allscripts team for excellent support and response.” CMIO Michael Sanders, MD dressed for the occasion in a brand new Kevlar vest and garish go-live socks, while the command center crew kept on top of the trouble tickets.

Government and Politics

The Treasury Department announces that the Affordable Care Act mandate that businesses with more than 50 employees must provide health insurance will be delayed for a year to 2015.

Innovation and Research

The Hoosier Healthcare Innovation Challenge will present three developer challenges in Indianapolis on July 12: reduce infant mortality by delivering educational information, eliminate duplicate messages caused by multiple Continuity of Care Documents, and perform medication reconciliation across inpatient and outpatient encounters. Teams can receive cash and an in-kind services worth up to $25,000.

The US Patent and Trademark Office awards LDM Group a patent for a method of providing targeted information to a patient through a physician’s server as a prescription is written.

Other

CORHIO reportsthat approximately 44 percent of Colorado’s 5.2 million residents are represented on the statewide HIE.Tea party activists in Ohio will use a little-known IRS provision that allows citizens to challenge the non-profit status and executive salaries of hospitals, saying that citizens should question why hospitals with large cash reserves need more federal money to deliver indigent care. One of the group’s leaders calls out Cleveland Clinic’s $9 billion in assets and CEO Toby Cosgrove’s $2.5 million annual salary, saying, “This guy’s making $2 million a year, pleading poverty to help poor people. It just seems a little disingenuous to us in the tea party who volunteer for nothing. We’re curious to see their definition of poverty.”

An unnamed South Carolina hospital’s humorous employee training video demonstrates the frustration patients feel when asked mandatory Meaningful Use questions. “I live in the US of A. My primary language is American.”

Walgreens will pay $1.38 million to a woman who sued the drug chain for filling a prescription incorrectly written by her doctor. The doctor realized that she had specified 100 mg of promethazine, quadruple the intended amount, and called the pharmacy to cancel it. The pharmacist did so, but a computer problem allowed the prescription to be filled anyway. The patient claimed side effects caused her to be fired.

One of the 850 employees laid off last month by St. Vincent Health (IN) was CMIO Alan Snell, MD. The health system also gave a pink slip to its chief medical officer.

Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center paid almost $1 million in legal fees and fines in a frantic effort to avoid having its clinical lab shut down by the federal government. That effort, aided by appeals by the state’s lawmakers to HHS, was successful. The hospital’s laboratory information system incorrectly flagged a proficiency test to be sent out to an external lab and a medical technology student didn’t catch the mistake.

Weird News Andy is fascinated that dogs are being trained to detect hyperglycemia in children by their smell, allowing them to paw the child as a signal to take corrective action. He also concludes that “you can’t legislate intelligence” after reading the story of a woman who mixed up Super Glue and cold sore cream with predictably gripping results and another in which six armed police officers take down the suspected “Surgical Mask Bandit” in a Wells Fargo bank, only to find that he’s a chemo patient making a withdrawal.

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Currently there are "4 comments" on this Article:

RE: An unnamed South Carolina hospital’s humorous employee training video demonstrates the frustration patients feel when asked mandatory Meaningful Use questions. “I live in the US of A. My primary language is American.”

I was impressed by the efficiency of the registration staff person in the South Carolina video. Somehow she managed to circumvent to need to photocopy the back and the front of the patient’s insurance card. Progress!

Kudos to ONC for trying to grasp the magnitude of patient safety issues caused by bad IT design, suboptimal to non existing testing and just plain lack of software engineering skills – all endemic to the HIT industry
Hopefully it will create a venue for HIT users to report issues, while bypassing the shameful, across the board gag clauses so prevalent in the vendors current contracts
Finally the Feds understand HIT is too important to be left to vendors to police on their own.
Unfortunately 2-3 decades of “free market” forces didn’t improve the quality of EHR
It only caused a hyperinflation of their pricing schemes, while creating unbelievable bad software

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